by Nora Ephron
The Pillsbury Company has been holding Bake-Offs since 1948, when Eleanor Roosevelt, for reasons that are not clear, came to give the first one her blessing. This year’s took place from Saturday, February 24, through Tuesday, February 27, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. One hundred contestants—ninety-seven of them women, two twelve-year-old boys, and one male graduate student—were winnowed down from a field of almost a hundred thousand entrants to compete for prizes in five categories: flour, frosting mix, crescent main dish, crescent dessert, and hot-roll mix. They were all brought, or flown, to Los Angeles for the Bake-Off itself, which took place on Monday, and a round of activities that included a tour of Universal Studios, a mini-version of television’s Let’s Make a Deal with Monty Hall himself, and a trip to Disneyland. The event is also attended by some one hundred food editors, who turn it from a mere contest into the incredible publicity stunt Pillsbury intends it to be, and spend much of their time talking to each other about sixty-five new ways to use tuna fish and listening to various speakers lecture on the consumer movement and food and the appliance business. General Electric is co-sponsor of the event and donates a stove to each finalist, as well as the stoves for the Bake-Off; this year, it promoted a little Bake-Off of its own for the microwave oven, an appliance we were repeatedly told was the biggest improvement in cooking since the invention of the Willoughby System. Every one of the food editors seemed to know what the Willoughby System was, just as everyone seemed to know what Bundt pans were. “You will all be happy to hear,” we were told at one point, “that only one of the finalists this year used a Bundt pan.” The food editors burst into laughter at that point; I am not sure why. One Miss Alex Allard of San Antonio, Texas, had already won the microwave contest and $5,000, and she spent most of the Bake-Off turning out one Honey Drizzle Cake after another in the microwave ovens that ringed the Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. I never did taste the Honey Drizzle Cake, largely because I suspected—and this was weeks before the Consumers Union article on the subject—that microwave ovens were dangerous and probably caused peculiar diseases. If God had wanted us to make bacon in four minutes, He would have made bacon that cooked in four minutes.
“The Bake-Off is America,” a General Electric executive announced just minutes before it began. “It’s family. It’s real people doing real things.” Yes. The Pillsbury Bake-Off is an America that exists less and less, but exists nonetheless. It is women who still live on farms, who have six and seven children, who enter county fairs and sponsor 4-H Clubs. It is Grace Ferguson of Palm Springs, Florida, who entered the Bake-Off seventeen years in a row before reaching the finals this year, and who cooks at night and prays at the same time. It is Carol Hamilton, who once won a trip on a Greyhound bus to Hollywood for being the most popular girl in Youngstown, Ohio. There was a lot of talk at the Bake-Off about how the Bake-It-Easy theme had attracted a new breed of contestants this year, younger contestants—housewives, yes, but housewives who used whole-wheat flour and Granola and sour cream and similar supposedly hip ingredients in their recipes and were therefore somewhat more sophisticated, or urban, or something-of-the-sort, than your usual Bake-Off contestant. There were a few of these—two, to be exact: Barbara Goldstein of New York City and Bonnie Brooks of Salisbury, Maryland, who actually visited the Los Angeles County Art Museum during a free afternoon. But there was also Suzie Sisson of Palatine, Illinois, twenty-five years old and the only Bundt-pan person in the finals, and her sentiments about life were the same as those that Bake-Off finalists presumably have had for years. “These are the beautiful people,” she said, looking around the ballroom as she waited for her Bundt cake to come out of the oven. “They’re not the little tiny rich people. They’re nice and happy and religious types and family-oriented. Everyone talks about women’s lib, which is ridiculous. If you’re nice to your husband, he’ll be nice to you. Your family is your job. They come first.”
I was seven years old when the Pillsbury Bake-Off began, and as I grew up reading the advertisements for it in the women’s magazines that were lying around the house, it always seemed to me that going to a Bake-Off would be the closest thing to a childhood fantasy of mine, which was to be locked overnight in a bakery. In reality, going to a Bake-Off is like being locked overnight in a bakery—a very bad bakery. I almost became sick right there on Range 95 after my sixth carbohydrate-packed sample—which happened, by coincidence, to be a taste of the aforementioned Mrs. Frisbie’s aforementioned Sweet ’n Creamy Crescent Crisps.
But what is interesting about the Bake-Off—what is even significant about the event—is that it is, for the American housewife, what the Miss America contest used to represent to teenagers. The pinnacle of a certain kind of achievement. The best in field. To win the Pillsbury Bake-Off, even to be merely a finalist in it, is to be a great housewife. And a creative housewife. “Cooking is very creative.” I must have heard that line thirty times as I interviewed the finalists. I don’t happen to think that cooking is very creative—what interests me about it is, on the contrary, its utter mindlessness and mathematical certainty. “Cooking is very relaxing”—that’s my bromide. On the other hand, I have to admit that some of the recipes that were concocted for the Bake-Off, amazing combinations of frosting mix and marshmallows and peanut butter and brown sugar and chocolate, were practically awe-inspiring. And cooking, it is quite clear, is only a small part of the apparently frenzied creativity that flourishes in these women’s homes. I spent quite a bit of time at the Bake-Off chatting with Laura Aspis of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a seven-time Bake-Off finalist and duplicate-bridge player, and after we had discussed her high-protein macaroons made with coconut-almond frosting mix and Granola, I noticed that Mrs. Aspis was wearing green nail polish. On the theory that no one who wears green nail polish wants it to go unremarked upon, I remarked upon it.
“That’s not green nail polish,” Mrs. Aspis said. “It’s platinum nail polish that I mix with green food coloring.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And the thing of it is,” she went on, “when it chips, it doesn’t matter.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because it stains your nails permanently,” Mrs. Aspis said.
“You mean your nails are permanently green?”
“Well, not exactly,” said Mrs. Aspis. “You see, last week they were blue, and the week before I made purple, so now my nails are a combination of all three. It looks like I’m in the last throes of something.”
On Sunday afternoon, most of the finalists chose to spend their free time sitting around the hotel and socializing. Two of them—Marjorie Johnson of Robbinsdale, Minnesota, and Mary Finnegan of Minneota, Minnesota—were seated at a little round table just off the Hilton ballroom talking about a number of things, including Tupperware. Both of them love Tupperware.
“When I built my new house,” Mrs. Johnson said, “I had so much Tupperware I had to build a cupboard just for it.” Mrs. Johnson is a very tiny, fortyish mother of three, and she and her dentist husband have just moved into a fifteen-room house she cannot seem to stop talking about. “We have this first-floor kitchen, harvest gold and blue, and it’s almost finished. Now I have a second kitchen on my walk-out level and that’s going to be harvest gold and blue, too. Do you know about the new wax Congoleum? I think that’s what I put in—either that or Shinyl Vinyl. I haven’t had to wash my floors in three months. The house isn’t done yet because of the Bake-Off. My husband says if I’d spent as much time on it as I did on the Bake-Off, we’d be finished. I sent in sixteen recipes—it took me nearly a year to do it.”
“That’s nothing,” said Mrs. Finnegan. “It took me twenty years before I cracked it. I’m a contest nut. I’m a thirty-times winner in the Better Homes & Gardens contest. I won a thousand dollars from Fleischmann’s Yeast. I won Jell-O this year, I’m getting a hundred and twenty-five dollars’ worth of Revere cookware for that. The Knox Gelatine contest. I’ve won seven blenders and a quintisserie. I
t does four things—fries, bakes, roasts, there’s a griddle. I sold the darn thing before I even used it.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Mrs. Johnson. “Did you enter the Crystal Sugar Name the Lake Home contest?”
“Did I enter?” said Mrs. Finnegan. “Wait till you see this.” She took a pen and wrote her submission on a napkin and held it up for Mrs. Johnson. The napkin read “Our Entry Hall.” “I should have won that one,” said Mrs. Finnegan. “I did win the Crystal Sugar Name the Dessert contest. I called it ‘Signtation Squares.’ I think I got a blender on that one.”
“Okay,” said Mrs. Johnson. “They’ve got a contest now, Crystal Sugar Name a Sauce. It has pineapple in it.”
“I don’t think I won that,” said Mrs. Finnegan, “but I’ll show you what I sent in.” She held up the napkin and this time what she had written made sense. “Hawaiian More Chant,” it said.
“Oh, you’re clever,” said Mrs. Johnson.
“They have three more contests so I haven’t given up,” said Mrs. Finnegan.
On Monday morning at exactly 9:00 a.m., the one hundred finalists marched four abreast into the Hilton ballroom, led by Philip Pillsbury, former chairman of the board of the company. The band played “Nothin’ Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ from the Oven,” and when it finished, Pillsbury announced: “Now you one hundred winners can go to your ranges.”
Chaos. Shrieking. Frenzy. Furious activity. Cracking eggs. Chopping onions. Melting butter. Mixing, beating, blending. The band perking along with such carefully selected tunes as “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake.” Contestants running to the refrigerators for more supplies. Floor assistants rushing dirty dishes off to unseen dishwashers. All two hundred members of the working press, plus television’s Bob Barker, interviewing any finalist they could get to drop a spoon. At 9:34 a.m., Mrs. Lorraine Walmann submitted her Cheesy Crescent Twist-Ups to the judges and became the first finalist to finish. At 10:00 a.m., all the stoves were on, the television lights were blasting, the temperature in the ballroom was up to the mid-nineties, and Mrs. Marjorie Johnson, in the course of giving an interview about her house to the Minneapolis Star, had forgotten whether she had put one cup of sugar or two into her Crispy Apple Bake. “You know, we’re building this new house,” she was saying. “When I go back, I have to buy living-room furniture.” By 11:00 a.m., Mae Wilkinson had burned her skillet corn bread and was at work on a second. Laura Aspis had lost her potholder. Barbara Bellhorn was distraught because she was not used to California apples. Alex Allard was turning out yet another Honey Drizzle Cake. Dough and flour were all over the floor. Mary Finnegan was fussing because the crumbs on her Lemon Cream Bars were too coarse. Marjorie Johnson was in the midst of yet another interview on her house. “Well, let me tell you,” she was saying, “the shelves in the kitchen are built low…. ” One by one, the contestants, who were each given seven hours and four tries to produce two perfect samples of their recipes, began to finish up and deliver one tray to the judges and one tray to the photographer. There were samples everywhere, try this, try that, but after six tries, climaxed by Mrs. Frisbie’s creation, I stopped sampling. The overkill was unbearable: none of the recipes seemed to contain one cup of sugar when two would do, or a delicate cheese when Kraft American would do, or an actual minced onion when instant minced onions would do. It was snack time. It was convenience-food time. It was less-work-for-Mother time. All I could think about was a steak.
By 3:00 p.m., there were only two contestants left—Mrs. Johnson, whose dessert took only five minutes to make but whose interviews took considerably longer, and Bonnie Brooks, whose third sour-cream-and-banana cake was still in the oven. Mrs. Brooks brought her cake in last, at 3:27 p.m., and as she did, the packing began. The skillets went into brown cartons, the measuring spoons into barrels, the stoves were dismantled. The Bake-Off itself was over—and all that remained was the trip to Disneyland, and the breakfast at the Brown Derby … and the prizes.
And so it is Tuesday morning, and the judges have reached a decision, and any second now, Bob Barker is going to announce the five winners over national television. All the contestants are wearing their best dresses and smiling, trying to smile anyway, good sports all, and now Bob Barker is announcing the winners. Bonnie Brooks and her cake and Albina Flieller and her Quick Pecan Pie win $25,000 each. Sharon Schubert and two others win $5,000. And suddenly the show is over and it is time to go home, and the ninety-five people who did not win the twenty-fourth annual Pillsbury Bake-Off are plucking the orchids from the centerpieces, signing each other’s programs, and grumbling. They are grumbling about Sharon Schubert. And for a moment, as I hear the grumbling everywhere—“It really isn’t fair….” “After all, she won the trip to Mexico”—I think that perhaps I am wrong about these women: perhaps they are capable of anger after all, or jealousy, or competitiveness, or something I think of as a human trait I can relate to. But the grumbling stops after a few minutes, and I find myself listening to Marjorie Johnson. “I’m so glad I didn’t win the grand prize,” she is saying, “because if you win that, you don’t get to come back to the next Bake-Off. I’m gonna start now on my recipes for next year. I’m gonna think of something really good.” She stopped for a moment. “You know,” she said, “it’s going to be very difficult to get back to normal living.”
—July 1973
I Just Want to Say: The Egg-White Omelette
THERE’S A NEW book out about diet, and it apparently says what I’ve known all my life—protein is good for you, carbohydrates are bad, and fat is highly overrated as a dangerous substance. Well, it’s about time. As my mother used to say, you can never have too much butter.
For example, here’s how we cook steak in our house: First you coat the steak in kosher salt. Then you cook the steak in a very hot frying pan. When it’s done, you throw a huge pat of butter on top of it. That’s it. And by the way, I’m not talking about sweet butter, I’m talking about salted butter.
Here’s another thing it says in this book: dietary cholesterol has nothing whatsoever to do with your cholesterol count. This is another thing I’ve known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. Let me explain this: You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I’m sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?
Which brings me to the point of this: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I’m forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they’re doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to the New York Times, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they’re the victims of something known as the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that’s repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn’t. (Why isn’t it called the misinformational cascade, I wonder.) In any case, the true victims of this misinformation are not the doctors but the people I know who’ve been brainwashed into thinking that egg-white omelettes are good for you.
So this is my moment to say what’s been in my heart for years: it’s time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I don’t want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it’s also time to put a halt to, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything about the war, whereas I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails.
You don’t make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting additional yolks
in. A really great omelette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining twelve eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellmann’s mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.
—November 2010
Gourmet Magazine
I’M NOT SURE you can make a generalization on this basis, which is the basis of twice, but here goes: whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine. I think of it as my own personal bride’s disease. The first time I started buying it was in 1967, when everyone my age in New York City spent hours talking about things like where to buy the best pistachio nuts. Someone recently told me that his marriage broke up during that period on account of veal Orloff, and I knew exactly what he meant. Hostesses were always making dinners that made you feel guilty, meals that took days to prepare and contained endless numbers of courses requiring endless numbers of plates resulting in an endless series of guests rising to help clear. Every time the conversation veered away from the food, the hostess looked hurt.
I got very involved in this stuff. Once I served a six-course Chinese dinner to twelve people, none of whom I still speak to, although not because of the dinner. I also specialized in little Greek appetizers that involved a great deal of playing with rice, and I once produced something known as the Brazilian national dish. Then, one night at a dinner party, a man I know looked up from his chocolate mousse and said, “Is this Julia’s?” and I knew it was time to get off.
